“Damnit, no sign,” he cursed.

  Wherever the alien had gone to, it wasn’t visible from here. Maxwell’s gaze went to the eastern wall. An Apiar missile was intended to rip apart the hardened alloy plating of a warship and the effect of the explosion on the comparatively thin double-skinned compound wall was catastrophic.

  The detonation had torn the wall open – rupturing metals and twisting them grotesquely. Jagged edges pointed into the compound, while in places the intense heat had melted the alloys and they drooped towards the ground. That heat hadn’t nearly dispersed and a huge section of the wall glowed different hues of red and orange.

  “Is the exit door intact?” asked Fine anxiously.

  “I don’t know,” said Maxwell, his eyes hunting for the outline of the frame that would show him the position of the door.

  After a few moments he saw what might have been a vertical line near the base of the wall, fifty metres south of the farthest extent of the missile damage. His heart jumped when he identified it beyond doubt as the personnel exit.

  “Got it,” he said. “It’s 120 metres north.”

  The bass of the destroyer’s engine was no louder than before, but suddenly Maxwell could hear another sound – the throbbing note of a Kijol shuttle travelling at low velocity. He twisted around, his eyes aimed upwards, but the night was dark and the buildings to either side limited his field of view.

  A younger Tyrus Maxwell might well have been frozen with indecision. He might have remained longer within the illusory safety of the alley, watching and waiting for the right moment to act. That Tyrus Maxwell was long gone.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Keep a close watch.”

  His feet pounded as he sprinted hard for the personnel exit. The moment he emerged from cover, Maxwell saw that debris from the shattered wall had been thrown into one of the northern accommodation prefabs with sufficient force to crumple its longest side. Smaller pieces of still-hot metal had struck the adjacent structure, puncturing its wall in several places.

  If the alien was nearby, it didn’t show itself, though Maxwell was beginning to think he wouldn’t believe it was dead until he had his foot on its throat and its head was full of gauss slugs from his rifle.

  Maxwell’s dash brought him to the personnel door in double-quick time and he headed straight for the access panel on the right-hand side. The light on the panel was green and the door itself had suffered no damage.

  Having placed his palm on the access panel, Maxwell spun so that his eyes were aimed west into the compound. He couldn’t see the outcome of the Kijol attack that way, but he could imagine, and patches of heat red glowed over the tops of the structures.

  The personnel door opened, revealing a two-metre-wide passage through the two skins of the perimeter wall.

  “Inside,” said Maxwell, indicating with his rifle.

  The soldiers hurried through the opening and when the last one vanished inside, Maxwell followed. Once in the tunnel, he paused briefly to give the compound a final look. The alien wasn’t visible.

  “Don’t let it get to you, Sergeant,” said Corporal Fine.

  Maxwell smiled thinly as he tapped the inner access panel. “I’m that obvious?”

  “It’ll either follow us and we’ll kill it, or the Kijol will do the work for us,” said Fine.

  “Yeah,” said Maxwell. He raised his voice. “Open the outer door.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Lyles.

  The passage was only a few metres long and when the far door opened, Maxwell could see nothing beyond the faint light produced by the missile heat. He knew there were trees that way, but it was too dark to see them.

  “Activate night vision,” said Maxwell. “And get the hell outside.”

  When he switched on the night vision enhancement, darkness turned into shades of sickly green. The soldiers were exiting the tunnel at speed and Maxwell followed. Once outside, he could see the thickness of the foliage, which had been cleared to only a hundred metres from the perimeter wall. Most of the plants were at least head-high and he hoped they might offer protection against a cursory scan of this area.

  The treeline was another hundred or so metres beyond the undergrowth. Now that he was at ground level, those trees seemed far larger and more imposing than they had on the initial approach to the compound.

  Something else caught his attention – to the south, in the direction of the enormous lake, the greens on the night vision were deeper than elsewhere, suggesting that something was illuminated that way. Maxwell was curious, but this wasn’t the time to investigate.

  “Head straight for the trees,” he ordered.

  Maxwell set off in that direction. Even though the ground had been levelled when the undergrowth was cleared, he was cautious not to trip or go sideways on his ankle. A broken bone here would be a death sentence, as sure as a cut throat and a bullet in the head.

  This watchfulness made the short journey to the undergrowth additionally frustrating, since Maxwell wanted more than anything to check behind for sight of the alien, or to watch out for the Kijol shuttles. He could still hear the propulsion of one, though it was maddeningly difficult to determine whether it was near or far, and in which direction it was flying.

  Maxwell was last into the undergrowth, and he entered a path trampled down by the others. The foliage was a mixture of tough, high grass, alongside leafier plants with yielding stems. Forging a way through would severely hamper progress. Competition for light meant the grasses and ferns grew higher than Maxwell’s head, though they wouldn’t offer much protection from a warship’s sensors.

  Five metres into the undergrowth, he stopped briefly and turned. The leaves were already closing behind him, but gaps remained enough for Maxwell to see back the way he’d come. As he watched, an object, its shape unclear, fell from the top of the perimeter wall and landed heavily on the ground. Gritting his teeth, Maxwell stared, but the object didn’t move, nor could he determine what it was.

  “What are you waiting for, Sergeant?” asked Corporal Fine on the comms.

  “You know damn well what I’m waiting for,” Maxwell growled.

  He turned and followed the soldiers, swatting aside encroaching plants with his left hand, and lifting his feet high to avoid tripping over broken fronds. The weight of his tread produced crunching and tearing sounds from the plants and his breathing was laboured from the effort. Each inhalation brought the scent of earth and leaves to his nostrils. It was familiar and alien at the same time. Every few seconds, Maxwell looked back, but he saw nothing.

  Not far ahead, the trees loomed. Most had tall trunks, with few branches low down. The canopy looked reassuringly impenetrable and Maxwell was hopeful the plant growth would be more sporadic at the floor layer.

  When he made it beneath the canopy, Maxwell looked upwards at the thick roof of leaves and branches. He felt better having them there, even if he wasn’t convinced they would defy a concerted effort by the Kijol to track down the soldiers. That was assuming the enemy would invest their time searching for a human force they didn’t know existed. Maxwell suspected the Kijol would have plenty to keep them interested in the compound, though he wasn’t about to start laying bets.

  Corporal Fine had called a halt, so that Maxwell wouldn’t get left behind. She stared at him with one hand on her hip and her gauss rifle pointing upwards at an angle.

  “I know - we need to stick together,” Maxwell acknowledged.

  “We can’t afford to become separated, Sergeant. Tracking down a straggler using comms pings would be a pain in the ass.” Fine’s serious expression changed to a smile. “At least we got out of there, huh?”

  “The bad news is, there’s not much hope we’ll be able to give positional data to the Marauder,” said Barkley. “Too many trees for us to obtain a visual on the target.”

  “I’ve already thought about that,” said Maxwell. “The lakeshore heads east for a distance and then it turns south. If we make it that far, we should have line of sight on the enemy warship.”

  “That’s assuming the destroyer sticks around near the base long enough for us to make it outside the jammer’s radius,” said Barkley.

  “Who made you pessimist of the year, Barkley?” asked Lyles.

  “I’ll try and look on the bright side more often,” said Barkley, deadpan.

  While the soldiers were talking, Maxwell thought he heard something crashing through the undergrowth to the north-west. He tensed up and levelled his gun in that direction. The noise didn’t come again, and all he could hear was the rustling of the trees.

  Maxwell was on the verge of ordering the soldiers to move out east, when the ever-present background bass of the Kijol destroyer increased in volume and intensity. The warship was changing position.

  “Shit, get out of sight!” ordered Maxwell, pressing himself against the rough trunk of a nearby tree.

  The other soldiers were experienced enough that they were all near cover and they disappeared in moments. For long seconds, Maxwell kept out of sight and listened. The destroyer’s Charos drive could generate immense thrust and the Xaros air would carry the vibration several kilometres in every direction.

  When the vibration fell once more to its previous lower level, Maxwell leaned out. Between the ground foliage and the canopy was a gap, and, though he couldn’t see the compound any longer, he had a view into the sky above it.

  The Kijol destroyer was stationary directly over the compound, at an angle that allowed Maxwell to see the curved spines of its flank, and its rectangular stern. A combination of the night vision and the enemy vessel’s position made it difficult for him to estimate the size of the warship. If it was the same new generation as the one at Tambus, it would be twelve hundred metres in length and a billion tons.

  When the numbers got so high, it didn’t matter much to the soldier on the ground. A plasma warhead from a Eternus battleship wouldn’t carbonize flesh any more thoroughly than a missile fired from this destroyer.

  Maxwell stared at the warship, feeling his hatred building. Somehow, he and his soldiers had to make it beyond the range of the Kijol jammer and then transmit precise positional data on the destroyer in order that the Marauder could hit it with Ghost missiles - assuming Captain Grisham was up for the fight.

  On top of everything else, Maxwell was certain the alien creature from the compound hadn’t given up on him or his soldiers.

  As the thought formed, movement caught his eye and he leaned out further. At the exit from the path through the foliage, a lone figure stood, no more than fifty metres away and visible through the trees. A human. The figure didn’t move, and the night vision didn’t allow Maxwell to see details of its face, but he could sense it watching him.

  The thermal sensor in his helmet detected no heat coming from the figure, so he twisted far enough that he could aim his rifle.

  “One of those corpses followed us,” said Maxwell.

  A shot to the corpse’s chest made it stumble backwards. Maxwell shot it again and it collapsed without a sound.

  “There’s a second over this way,” said Chau. He fired his gun fired twice, the fizzing of coils only just audible over the background noise of the destroyer’s propulsion. “It’s down.”

  “Any others?” asked Maxwell.

  None of the soldiers reported a sighting, though he wasn’t nearly convinced the threat was gone.

  Maxwell stepped away from the tree, keeping its trunk between himself and the destroyer. “We have to get away from here.”

  He knew he couldn’t escape the alien by running, but with the Kijol destroyer hovering over the compound, forcing a confrontation here wasn’t an option.

  Taking care to use the trees as cover, Maxwell headed deeper into the jungle. Although the Xaros wildlife had settled down for the night, he still heard distant sounds – rustlings and cracklings - which put him on edge. Meanwhile the uneven ground, hidden by the waist-high foliage, required Maxwell’s constant attention to avoid injuring himself. It was attention he’d far rather have given to watching out for the alien creature.

  Maxwell and the soldiers pressed on. It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Why is that thing following us?” asked Lowe a short time after the Kijol destroyer had been completely obscured by the dense jungle.

  “Because we know,” said Maxwell. “We’ve seen it.”

  “I thought you said it wanted to get onto the Marauder, Sergeant.”

  “You’re looking for answers I don’t have,” said Maxwell. His anger made him want to snap at Lowe, but he kept his voice calm. The soldiers weren’t to blame for this situation.

  “There’s got to be more than one of those aliens,” said Diaz.

  “That’s the likely truth,” said Maxwell.

  “Maybe one of those aliens figured that we left the compound so the Marauder could pick us up,” said Lyles. “And that’s why it’s following.”

  “I’ve had enough of guessing for the moment, Private.”

  Maxwell said nothing further and pressed on over the uneven ground, forging through an area of waist-high fernlike plants. Hidden stems pulled at his feet, forcing him to lean into the walk and put extra effort into each stride, as if he were wading through water. It was tough going and he wasn’t sure if he could maintain the pace for a full ten kilometres.

  Maxwell had more than just the walk to contend with. Since the alien was almost certainly following, that meant the soldiers had to take additional precautions. They stuck close together in their squads, with Squad B at the rear keeping an eye on the jungle behind. In a while, Maxwell intended to swap, so that Squad A had the rear.

  Every so often, rustling noises came from the jungle, sometimes near, sometimes far, sometimes on the ground and occasionally from overhead. It was impossible to know if these were natural sounds made by the planet’s denizens, or caused by something more sinister. The soldiers were understandably on edge and they were becoming jumpy from it.

  “It’s going to take us more than three hours at this pace,” said Corporal Fine. “Maybe as many as four. Watching our backs is slowing us down almost as much as the jungle. When are you planning to cut south to the lakeshore, Sergeant?”

  “Soon,” said Maxwell. He grimaced. “Screw it, let’s head that way now. When the time and the place are right, we might lay a surprise for whatever’s coming after us.”

  He changed course to the south-east, using the compass on his HUD for guidance. The ground rose steadily for a time and then fell away once more. Maxwell knew the lakeshore was nearby and he hoped that the beach he’d seen on the shuttle ride to the compound extended this far.

  It was downhill all the way to the lake. The first Maxwell saw of it, was the same intense green on his night vision that he’d noticed when exiting the compound not long ago. He pressed on and soon emerged onto a narrow beach. Ten metres of powdery sand separated the trees from the water.

  For as far as Maxwell could see, the lake was glowing. He deactivated the night vision and was greeted by a wondrous sight.

  A property of the algae covering the lake surface caused it to emit a faint blue light that was both rich and warm. As far as the southern horizon it went, as well as to the east and west, faintly undulating across its surface as the algae rose and fell with the gentle movement of the water.

  For a moment, Maxwell could only stare in awe at the beauty created by this alien world.

  “Well would you look at that?” said Diaz.

  “More alien shit,” said Lowe. “Give me a pizza and a beer any day of the week.”

  “Man, you’ve got a heart of stone,” said Diaz, shaking her head.

  With an effort, Maxwell drew his attention from the lake. Even at this distance, he could feel the Kijol destroyer’s propulsion, albeit much less than before. With some reluctance, he turned on his night vision once again, and advanced down the beach towards the gently lapping waves.

  When his feet were almost in the water, Maxwell was just able to see the southern edge of the compound further along the shore. The destroyer hadn’t moved and it hung in the air, appearing as a green so dark it was almost lost against the background.

  “The treeline will keep us covered,” he said. “As long as we don’t act careless.”

  The light from the algae wasn’t nearly bright enough to allow the soldiers to proceed safely and Maxwell kept his night vision active, albeit with some reluctance.

  Returning to the edge of the trees, Maxwell set off to the east. Where the sand and dry soil mingled, the footing was good and he was able to increase his pace significantly. After travelling a couple of hundred metres at a fast walk, he broke into a jog. Staring ahead, he could see the shore continued almost directly east, and that meant the soldiers could put in some good distance without fear the Kijol destroyer’s sensor crew would spot them.

  After five kilometres, Maxwell was beginning to feel a lessening of the pressure. He could no longer hear the enemy spacecraft and the jungle was quiet. Calling a halt, he instructed Private Barkley to attempt contact with the Marauder.

  “I tried a few hundred metres back there, Sergeant,” said Barkley, thumbing over his shoulder. “The Kijol jammers have a ten-klick radius.”

  “I know that,” said Maxwell. “Since that destroyer is so low to the ground, maybe the trees will interfere with the enemy hardware.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Barkley. He was quiet for a moment. “Still nothing. Worth a try though, huh?”

  Maxwell didn’t call an immediate resumption. Instead, he studied the land east, as best as he was able given the limitations of the night vision. Not far ahead, the shore drifted south and then he and his soldiers would come within the visibility arc of the destroyer’s sensors.

  “Another thousand metres and we’ll be back in the trees.” Maxwell was about to curse but stopped himself. “I guess we should be grateful to have made such good progress.”

  “And with no sign of any corpses,” said Vaughan.